SEO Scientist – Applying the scientific method to SEO

How to find linking resources through Google AdWords

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Any webmaster/SEO has reached the same inspirational rock bottom when it comes to getting links to a website close to his heart – link source exhaustion. With all the directories submitted to, hundreds of emails sent to webmasters, thousands of comment/signature spam links left, you have the will, you have the resources but there is absolutely nowhere left to look. So here is a thought. Google indexes all the sites on the Internet anyway. So why not ask them to give you a list of relevant sites you can contact for links ?

Here is a little step-by-step tutorial that has helped me do this more than once:

1. Create a substantial relevant keyword list . Don’t be afraid to dig sideways. Even a fleeting association with your main theme is good enough.
2. Create AdWords campaign for your site, bidding for the keywords from the above list. Limit the campaign to Content Network.
3. Plan the bidding daily budget in a way so that you don’t spend too much money on it. The purpose of the exercise is not necessarily to get traffic to your site (although it is a nice bonus. Usually badly converting one, but still a bonus), but to develop a list of sites that can serve as potential link sources.
4. Let the campaign run for a week.
   
5. After a week (or couple of thousands of impressions, whichever comes first), run a Placement Report for the period throughout which the campaign is running (click on thumbnail on the right to see the snapshot of the type-of-report-choosing step in Google AdWords)
6. Harvest the list of websites that showed your ad through Google AdSense program.
7. Start contacting webmasters and offering them, ahem, your eternal friendship and appreciation in exchange for a link with the preferable anchor text. For better results, preferably contact those websites that have actually brought you conversions. There is going to be a lot of pruning of useless MySpace accounts (although there may be a few useful ones there) but some gems will emerge.
8. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The idea is that Google is placing ads in the content network on sites they consider relevant to your niche (their effectiveness at doing so is debatable, but that is a different issue altogether). So take the list of URLs that have shown your ad and voilà.

So you may have spent a few bucks on the AdWords, however, instead of purchasing relevant links for big bucks, you have invested some of that money in potentially relevant traffic AND gained dozens of URLs with linking potential. Naturally, this process has a learning curve which will get you to the point where you are bidding only for those keywords that trigger your ad on very relevant sites.

Good luck.

Tags: sphinn

Posted in Google, Linking, SEO